silver linings
I feel compelled to write about COVID-19.
About 5,000 miles away, my immediate family is in the belly of the beast- New York City. New York has the most number of coronavirus cases at the time I am writing. This is unsurprising for one of the most densely populated cities in the world, but alarming for people who now need to practice stillness. New Yorkers are strangers to stillness.
Slowly they became acquainted, the people and the stillness. Yet even while businesses and gatherings pause, tragedy continues. Funeral homes are filled to capacity. Refrigerated trucks overflow with dead bodies and drive down streets once so vibrant with life. Death tolls constantly flash on the news screen, more lengthy than a video game high score, more than entire county populations. Relationships wax and wane with the moons as time lengthens since we’ve last embraced faraway loved ones. Neighborhood alleyways in South America went viral for their transformation from streets to halls of death. It seems as though no corner of Earth is safe from this omnipresent pandemic. Even institutions and bureaucracies begin to waver their rules like silk in the wind- suddenly necessary tests are cancelled, suddenly non-optional processes are expendable.
Social media reminds us of plagues past to warn us, truthfully, that this could just be an extension of the beginning. West African parents hurriedly share both helpful native immunity boosting tips (drink boiled pineapple skin and ginger, drink hibiscus tea, chew raw garlic) and blatant rumors (which need not be repeated) via WhatsApp. Being online can feel like pandemonium nowadays.
Covid-19 knows no race or sex, but like every other living being, Covid-19 knows survival- in the air, to your surfaces, underneath your fingertips. Perhaps better than us, it knows. Covid knows that to survive we need work and we need money, and so the disease latched onto the workforce of small and big businesses in addition to our physical currencies. Owners worldwide are forced to slow production or halt it altogether. As far as I have seen, our humanity has no backup plan for labor for wages except to circulate more money; after that, what next? Covid knew survival well enough to attack capitalist systems that world stability is built upon. Evil genius.
To counteract the evil and the uncertainty of Covid, we can create. We can create new art or new writing or new clothes out of old clothes, new habits and new recipes and new skills thanks to Youtube tutorials. We can create new space by reorganizing and rearranging indoors. We can create positive routines- for example, write down 3 things you are grateful for every day. Just 3, to stay aware of your blessings and to help force your mind into a realm of positivity even if only for a brief moment. We can create to-do lists in the mornings to cross off by the time evening arrives. It could be as simple as getting out of bed or as dynamic as exercise for 1 hour, but it will feel good to have a visual reminder of your daily accomplishment(s). We can create silences devoid of fear and fill them with faith instead.
Quarantine does not have to connote isolation. You can become closer with people you live with who you may have been too busy to talk to or appreciate in the past. Become closer with yourself through metacognitive processes. Become closer to God in prayer.
Do what you can to make this new reality enticing for yourself. You deserve that effort.